San Francisco is a rather marvelous little city that fondly remembers and honors its past while embracing the future. Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration has recently announced that they will accept bids to blanket the city in wireless Internet access, effectively allowing anyone with a computer and a wireless internet adaptor to have free access to the Internet. The announcement was barely made before he warned that they’ll be facing an uphill legal battle against Internet Service Providers (ISPs) if they implement their plans. After all, free, ubiquitous wireless access would cut directly into the profits of these ISPs.

I imagine that, eventually, the needs for ubiquitous internet access, whether wired or unwired, will be so great that it will be like electricity - available just about everywhere and taken for granted that you’ll face a monthly bill for it. While not everyone is online quite yet, the benefits of being online are clearly being demonstrated through such recent events as hurricane Katrina. Following the disaster, several web sites were established to not only accept and disseminate donations for those affected, but also to help those separated from their loved ones to reconnect through the chaos. The internet facilitates better communication and opens more channels through which information may flow, which is critical during an emergency situation.

So blanketing SF with Wi-Fi access is truly in the public’s best interest and the city is right in taking actions to make it happen. The argument that it unfairly competes with ISPs just doesn’t carry water for me. Consider this:

• Initially at least, the most the City plans to offer is a 300kb uplink. In contrast, most DSL carriers now offer 1.5Mb down and at least 300kb up. The downstream - which results in faster load times for web pages and quicker receiving of email - is almost five times faster for private service than for what the City is currently promising. That’s a considerable difference.
• As much as I do trust the city to contract with a reliable carrier (one of the bigger players to respond was Google), there will no doubt be many problems during the implementation stage. A private carrier, assuming they actually train their customer service teams, will probably be a bit more reliable and have the opportunity to be more responsive to their customers’ needs
• There is little doubt in my mind that the City’s plan will not allow for individuals to run their own servers. There will simply be too many individuals to serve to allow for that. Many ISPs reserve huge blocks of address space that they could provide to individuals wanting to host their own servers from their location. This alone would be worth the premium paid for using a private ISP, in my opinion

While it’s true that the ISPs serving San Francisco will no doubt see their numbers drop a bit, they can easily reposition themselves to better compete against free by maintaining solid, dependable service, providing human-based, well-trained and polite customer support and offer premium services that the municipal internet simply can’t support.

Legal blockades to innovation are useless. The RIAA is spending a ton of money attempting to fight piracy, which has resulted in poor PR, the ire of several well-known artists and a hemorrage of money that could be better spent repositioning the recording industry to better serve the new digital markets. The ISPs would be wise to learn from that experience and take the money they would otherwise use for litigation and invest it in improvements intended to enhance their offerings and, thus, their competitive advantage. Let the citizens of San Francisco have their free, ubiquitous internet access. Then demonstrate to them why private access is even better.